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Sponsoring FOSSi Foundation |
The Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation fosters free and open source semiconductor design. The Foundation is working toward a mature free and open source digital design ecosystem, the benefits of which include faster time to market with better tested, free and open semiconductor designs and ultimately cheaper and more secure electronics.
Inspired by the success of free and open source software, the FOSSi Foundation will help bring about IP and tools of comparable quality to proprietary offerings, and which are developed according to an open source model by a highly collaborative and inclusive community.
The FOSSi Foundation will address the issues the field currently faces; fragmentation, legal uncertainty, design quality, and high barriers to entry. We are asking for sponsors to help us work towards our goals throughout 2017 and beyond, and ask that you consider sponsoring or donating to the FOSSi Foundation.
Please read our Sponsorship Proposal and get in touch with us at sponsoring@fossi-foundation.org.
In the following we answer frequently asked questions and give examples of how you and the broader community can benefit from our activities.
We have started the FOSSi Foundation from within the free and open source silicon community with the goal to have a robust, community-controlled instance to support the community with resources and a platform.
The FOSSi Foundation is formed of individual members that elect the board of directors to follow the goals. The board forms committees of experts from our members and a broader community with the mandate to steer our activities.
In a brief summary our goal is to help the community with building quality free and open source silicon, tools and the related ecosystem.
We believe that everyone benefits from a an active and mature ecosystem around free and open source silicon: hobbyists, academia and industry.
You can find a more extensive description of our values and goals in our manifesto.
The FOSSi Foundation is registered as a Community Interest Company in the UK and operates worldwide. A Community Interest Company is a special form of a limited corporation that can only operate in the interest of the community. Beyond that a binding asset lock applies, that forbids to pay dibidends or extract any assets from the foundation.
With this company form and our organization we have established a robust, vendor-independent, community-oriented legal entity to work towards our goals.
We use the funds to move our goals forward. We believe we started and run the projects and committees that perfectly fit the needs of the community. You can find more details about our plans for 2017 in the sponsorship proposal.
The most of the money is evenly distributed between running our annual conference ORConf and the developement and running costs of our community portal LibreCores.org. Some funds are reserved to develop the legal framework for free and open source silicon and to cover our administrative costs.